Investigating gender-specific determinants of help-seeking behaviors and Walk, Talk ‘n’ Listen participation in older adults with hearing loss
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: Hearing loss (HL), which affects 78% of Canadians aged 60-79, can negatively impact socialization, health, and cognition. Many people take years to seek help, and most go undiagnosed or untreated. Walk, Talk ‘n’ Listen (WTL) was a community based randomized control trial of older adults with HL aimed at determining the benefit of group exercise and health education added to Group Auditory Rehabilitation. Unlike most group exercise programs, the majority of participants were male. We aimed to explore motivators and barriers to help seeking in older adults with HL.Methods: Semi-structured guided interviews were conducted on 14 participants of WTL. Qualitative content analysis identified key themes within each cluster of ideas discussed. Results: Participants discovered their HL through difficulties functioning or by external advisement (via family members or hearing tests), and were motivated to seek help for the same reasons. Men were motivated by their partners, specifically. Denial was the main reason for delay followed by pride/stigma. Participants joined the WTL to be proactive in their health, for physical activity, because they felt it was relevant for them, and, for men, for the support of others. Barriers were either physical (geography and disabilities) or social (denial, resistant to change, misconceptions about WTL). Conclusion: Older adults are delayed in recognizing and understanding the extent of their hearing loss, and thus delayed in seeking help. This could be mitigated by improved screening of HL in older adults, or by targeting family members to promote help seeking, especially men’s communication partners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".